Steve Pavlina’s “If Everyone Awakens Will We All Starve?”

Steve Pavlina posted another great article yeserday, titled “If Everyone Awakens Will We All Starve?” in which he examines the idea question of what would happen to the world if everyone “woke up” and started living a life of purpose. I thought this was an interesting question and something I have thought about myself.

It actually reminds me of the situation that the character Mustafa Mond talked about in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World. In this utopian future that worships Ford and Freud, social castes are biologically engineered to create the perfect social structure. At the top are the members of the Alpha caste; they take care of all the highest level, intellectual work while the Betas, Deltas and Epsilons do technical or menial tasks. At one point in the novel, the World Controller, Mustafa Mond talks about an experiment that was done where 22,000 Alpha-Double-Plus individuals were sent to Cyprus, basically to see what would happen to a colony of leaders that had no followers. According to Mond, it did not turn out well. Over 80% were killed in just a few years in a civil war that erupted on the island.

I am also reminded of the “human sacrifices” in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. In this section of the book, the main character goes to a gas station in the middle of the night and drags out the 23-year-old attendant at gun point. The protagonist finds out that this young man once wanted to be a Veterinarian, but is now just working a dead-end job because school was too expensive. He takes the kid’s driver’s license and tells him that if he’s not on his way to becoming a Veterinarian in a few months, he would hunt him down and kill him, because “I’d rather kill you than see you working a shit job for just enough money to buy cheese and watch television.” You later find out that he has done this dozens, maybe hundreds, of times, and is having people all over the country do similar things.

Napoleon Hill also addressed this subject in his books and speeches. He said that only about 2% of people, at most, will do what is necessary to really make something better out of their lives and live with a true purpose. I tend to agree with that. That is the way the world has always worked. The world only needs a relatively few leaders to function.

Are you going to be one of those leaders?

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
-Shakespeare